


Hollow 2 - Further Down The Spiral

by AdderTwist



Series: Hollow [2]
Category: X-Men Evolution
Genre: Abandonment, Dysfunctional Family, Familial Abuse, Gen, Part 2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-26
Updated: 2010-06-26
Packaged: 2017-10-10 07:03:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/96970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdderTwist/pseuds/AdderTwist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leaving a place doesn't mean you escape it. The girl is dying; Wanda will be a thing of vengeance and nothing else.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hollow 2 - Further Down The Spiral

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SandyQuinn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SandyQuinn/gifts).



> The usual deal. This could be triggering, this is my interpretation of a canonically bad situation, angst and neglect and a big fat tub of crazy. Part two of a three part series; preceded The Downward Spiral and followed by Tunnel Through Earth.

Wanda couldn't sleep in the new house. It was breaking down and it smelled like decay and hopelessness. It suited the other tenants perfectly.

There was Pietro, of course, but Wanda didn't even want to think of him. He flinched if she even glanced in his direction, and so she took a quiet, vicious pleasure in tormenting him. Since he had to be kept alive and functioning, for now, but Wanda couldn't keep the fury down cleanly, she tormented him, endlessly, daddy's boy, the one who was good enough to stay. Facing that, every day, the humiliation of never being good enough put into flesh - and he was so proud, too - she thought that perhaps that much hate would poison her, kill her with the force of it. She had to swallow down tears and rage when he fled, the whole house shaking. She slammed the door and shook and raged, pacing and pacing, one prison traded for another, but when she fell to hands and knees, retching up bile and water onto the carpet from the knot of loathing, distantly she was grateful for use of her hands.  
"Are you - are you o-okay, Wan - "  
Wanda threw herself at the door, snarling. Pietro was even more cautious after that, mouth thinning, eyes going wild whenever Wanda was around, wholeheartedly searching for an escape route.

If it had been only Pietro, it would have been easy enough to torture him until he blabbed out where Magnus was - and she tried, oh she tried.  
Pietro hid his sharp, loathsome face, shaking and crying, when Wanda finally cornered him, alone and far from the Brotherhood house.  
"I don't know - where he is - " he pleaded and pleaded, and Wanda almost killed him, came so close to just getting rid of him for good, but he had no information yet. Maybe daddy dear would come to the rescue for the piece of slime, or maybe one of them would slip. Sick though it made her, he'd live. He'd be useful.

The others were no help either.  
Freddy was kind, easily cowed, and stupid. She hated him, quiet fumbling hands and affection, big and strong and fat and slow and unexpectedly gentle with everyone, compassionate. She wished he wasn't. She wanted to be that kind of powerful, strong enough to never be stopped, to rend and tear, and he wasted it all on kindness and she hoped he'd choke. He ate enough that it was statistically likely that he would, maybe even soon, and she took that as consolation and only hurled the couch into him when he tried to gather her shaking shoulders in under his arm.  
"I don't need your help and I don't want it either," she'd snarled, and he'd looked back at her dumb and loyal as a dog, leaning on the broken couch while Wanda tried to figure out what else she could hit him with without bringing the house down on herself.  
Useless fucker couldn't even get her closer to killing her father, just stared wide-eyed at her while she was ill with rage.

There was Lance, cocky and reckless and pathetic. Useless to her as well. He had some crush and it made him stupid, and he was plenty stupid enough already. He reminded Wanda of Magnus, and that earned him some vehement attacks, but Wanda was so sick with loathing that she was lashing out blind at this point, like shards of metal, too unrelenting to be glass but too sharp to be anything but broken, and killing him would just get her murdered in her sleep. That couldn't happen, not yet.

Not until Magnus was painfully dead.  
Or - or just dead at all. He didn't belong on this planet.

And then there was Todd.  
He reeked of smoke and swamp and filth, and he moved like an animal. He was vile.  
Wanda hated him most of all, looking at her with quiet emotion in his eyes; she wanted to scrub herself clean because he didn't hate her, wasn't scared like the others, but when he came home with blood in his mouth, she'd swept into the night and she'd made all the people she could track down who were involved in the debacle break limbs and bleed and hurt more than they ever had before, made them scream. (Two football players out for the season, one tripping down into his cellar, the other falling hard from his roof trying to fix the TV aerial.)  
It was easier than it ever had been for the girl, and there was a certain hot lump of satisfaction sinking in the pit of her stomach. That was sick too, but she let it stay.  
Of all of them, Todd would probably fight for her.  
She wished she didn't think so. She hated him.

Sometimes Mystique would be there, miserable crawling creature that she was, sensuous and disgusting. She visited as if she was trying to mark territory, snarled and demanded and loomed at the boys. Wanda disliked her in a wearier way, revolted by someone who would change allegiance so easily, but with no personal grudge. She was just some idiot Wanda hated, this great sweeping disdain for everything in her path.

The others went to school, and she fought the sounds in her head. She was pretty sure this meant that she was crazy, but she couldn't sleep for very long at a time, any more. She kept expecting to die. And she couldn't calm down, couldn't breathe when they were near her, so school was just as well.

And she wasn't lonely.

And she wasn't afraid.

She was Wanda, and Wanda turned it all to fury.

It took three weeks for her to sleep at all, and then it was restless, all white halls and white ceilings and white canvas straitjackets and glass and steel.  
And needles, an endless parade of injections and chemicals and searing stinging steel piecing into her.

She woke up panting, face wet and eyes wild, and Pietro was there, leaning over her anxiously.  
"Are you okay? I heard you call out - " Wanda didn't think, lashed out blindly, catching his throat and hitting him twice before he managed to pull away, stunned and bleeding at the mouth. Pietro, all white hair and angles in the gloom, did not glow in the moonlight, simply picked out in simple, harsh lines. Never before had Wanda felt this angry, and she felt as if she should be seeing red.

The only red was the blood on Pietro's mouth, dribbling down his chin. Slow like he wasn't, red and red and it was driving her crazy with the want to tear her apart.

"I'll kill you," she raged, hearing her voice too loud and too brittle in the air, waking the whole house from sleep. Pietro looked away, swallowing hard, and he looked sick and Wanda thought, wildly, that he had no right to be suffering, it wasn't him who'd been cast away. "You traitor, I'll kill you, you left me there - "  
She stopped, when she realised that Pietro had already fled, that everyone was cowering as far from them as they could get.  
She slammed her door, fell against it, and shuddered, sucking in a breath that felt like the air was wet, like she was breathing in decay and swamp and rot with every struggling lungful.

She is calmer now, out of exhaustion and a newfound hate for humans. Without them, she could have left by now. She wouldn't have to hold back, she could have Magnus' head on a plate. She co-operates with the Brotherhood boys, reluctant and sick but needing survival, and she sleeps less and less. Migraines from stress and sleep deprivation rule her waking time, screaming dreams of claustrophobic white and wickedly thick needles rule her sleeping time, and revenge is the only think that keeps her from losing herself completely in this.  
Hate is an anchor.  
Hate and hate and more hate, and she is not happy or in despair, simply awash in it, incapable of feeling anything else past the ragged knot of fury that pulls her apart, caustic.  
Irreversible damage.  
But it's enough to make her smile.


End file.
